The present invention relates to a pendant assembly of the type that is suspended from the ceiling in a hospital room in order to provide easy access to various necessary services such as electrical power, medical gases, vacuum and the like. Such pendant assemblies are generally utilized in the hospital operating room and need to be conveniently located near the personnel yet due to considerable other equipment in that room, it is advantageous to avoid clutter by maintaining wires, and gas tubing out of the way of the operating personnel. In addition the pendant assemblies may serve as shelves for various monitoring equipment and therefore need to be easily locatable within access of the personnel.
Such pendant assemblies are, therefore, suspended over the various personnel using the same and, since the need for different locations for such services arise, the pendant assembly must be readily moveable by a control that can raise or lower the unit as well as be manually rotatable about a pivoted mounting on the ceiling. Such flexibility allows the pendant to be moved to almost any desired position in the operating room.
One of the difficulties in using such moveable pendant assemblies is in the ability of personnel to devote their full attention to its movements. The operating staff is generally busy with numerous functions and the raising or lowering of the pendant assembly may draw less attention than other, more pressing matters.
Accordingly, with the considerable other equipment present in an operating room, it is possible for personnel to lower the distribution head located at the service end of pendant assemblies to a position when it encounters an obstruction, that is, the distribution head hits one of the other pieces of equipment in the room and thereby causes damage and disrupts the activities of the personnel.
The problem is even more aggravated than the mere addition of means such as a limit switch that is fixed in location as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,919,540 since the pendant assembly needs to have some automatic protective device that is operable in any of numerous positions throughout the operating room.